Touch and Expression in Piano Playing

By Clarence G. Hamilton

This brief yet comprehensive guide shows pianists how to produce every possible variety of tone, including note values, pulsation, phrases and their combination, dynamic contrasts and shadings, tempo, color, and style. The two-part treatment addresses kinds of touch and the application of touch to expression, offering methods for achieving more sensitive execution in practice and performance.
An essential volume for all piano students and teachers, this book emphasizes the relationship between techniques of touch and the expression of the composer's intention. The author excerpts and analyzes portions of famous piano works and explains the uses of distinctive musical styles — repeats and irregular measures, rhythms, and accents — to assist students in their interpretation. He also includes hand and finger techniques for varied effects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Oct 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9780486320977

Book preview

PART I. TOUCH

BEFORE considering the matter of touch, let us thoroughly free our minds from bias in favor of any one of the so-called methods of piano technic, however excellent such method may be. Let us remember that piano playing has been through a process of evolution during more than two hundred years, while players and teachers have stumbled along, experimenting in this way and that, many times propagating ideas that have afterward been supplanted by much better ones. Pupils of famous teachers, too, have often slavishly followed out their dicta, long after more enlightened methods have been invented by progressive players. Such masters as Liszt and Chopin, for instance, employed a new freedom of technic which amazed the adherents of the cut-and-dried systems of Hummel, Czerny and their followers, and which was correspondingly slow of general adoption.

In recent years, however, the searchlight of modern science has been directed upon piano playing, as upon most other subjects; with the result that, setting aside the empirical precepts that were formerly accepted as law and gospel, players and teachers have scientifically investigated the relative values for playing purposes of the muscles of the arm and hand, and have determined how these muscles may best be directed and coördinated to produce desired effects. Having such knowledge at his command, the individual player can judge for himself what kinds of touch to apply to a given passage, and can test intelligently the statements and suggestions of instructors and their methods.

Useless Motions

Let us, at the outset, distinguish carefully between essential and non-essential muscular movements. To the latter class belong those gyrations, such as throwing the arms up in the air, or jerking the hand violently back from the wrist, which are employed either to catch the crowd or through ignorance of the keyboard mechanism, and which are as musically useless as were the antics of the old-time drum-major. With such movements may be listed the unnecessary pressure on a key after it has been sounded, which has no other result than to stiffen the performer’s wrist, since it takes place after the hammer has fallen back from the string.

Relaxation

Before he proceeds to the study of piano touch, the student should acquire the ability to relax thoroughly all the muscles which have to do with playing; for without such ability he is as badly off as the sculptor who tries to fashion an image out of unyielding clay.

Next, he should gain such control over the playing factors that any given muscle or combination of muscles will respond instantly to his call, without interference from others.

APPLICATION.—To secure complete relaxation, sit before the keyboard and let the right arm hang down from the shoulder. Press the fingers downward, so that their tips approach the floor as nearly as possible, and then let go.

A powerful muscle which is almost constantly in use is the biceps in the upper arm. Employing this muscle, raise the forearm, with the hand still relaxed, until the hand hangs over the keys with the fingers pointing downward as in illustration A, and nearly touching them. Now allow the forearm to descend gently, so that the fingers rest lightly on the keys and the wrist is below them (illustration B).

ILLUSTRATION A

ILLUSTRATION B

Return to the former position above the keys, and lastly to the first position, with the arm at the side. These motions should be repeated a number of times with each hand.

Classes of Touch

Having thus established the basic condition of hand and arm, we are prepared to study tone-production. Since the direct medium for this lies in the depression of the keys by the fingers, we have then to discover just how this depression is best effected; or, in other words, what are the most useful and legitimate kinds of touch.

While many varieties of touch have been employed during the entire history of piano playing, those chiefly used by the modern pianist are four in number, distinguished by the different ways in which the energy that is transmuted through the finger-tips is generated in the muscular activities of hand, arm and shoulder.

Forearm Rotation

A valuable aid to all four of these touches is known as forearm rotation. We have all heard the expression as easy as turning the hand over. But it has been discovered that this extremely simple movement, which necessarily involves also the forearm, may, if properly applied, generate a considerable degree of force to add to the pianist’s stock-in-trade. For each hand, this motion may